Echo
by SteveGarbage
Summary: He had hoped things would be different. But after surviving a Kett attack on his research station, Caelus Wolf is beginning to realize some things never change. Pressed into service with APEX, he's being forced to live the life of a soldier, a life he had purposely avoided back home. But he can't seem to outrun his past, following him like echoes across dark space.
1. Chapter 1

**One**

He had traveled 634 years from home, but Andromeda was no different.

New galaxy, same shit.

The main contrast was here there was some kind of web of electric tentacles stretching across most of the cluster that enjoyed molesting planets. Nothing like that in the Milky Way. That was all Andromeda.

Golden Worlds? Yeah, that part of the promotional materials turned out to be far less than advertised. No doubt there was an asterisk somewhere and some fine print stating that "The Andromeda Initiative is not responsible for actual condition of habitats upon arrival in the Heleus Cluster."

He drummed his fingers across the holstered pistol at his right hip as he slouched back in the functional metal chair seated at the functional metal table. The Turian security officer standing in the corner by the door of the interview room stood silently with a functional M-8 Avenger held in his hands.

Nexus Security had wanted him to give up his weapon. When they asked him to surrender his pistol, he had not-so-politely declined. He had traded one of the research station's power cells for the rather genius cobble-job whipped up by the Nexus exiles. He wasn't going to just hand it over.

There were a couple aliens who he left on the moon who he was pretty sure regretted walking in front of the six-shooter. That was, if they were still alive to regret things.

The asshole Turian security guards decided it wasn't worth pushing the issue before they were the next ones to end up on the wrong end of his gun. No doubt they just watched to get their claws on it so they could examine what the exiles had constructed and how. Tough luck.

The door opened and in walked another damned Turian. White carapace. Blue streaks on his face. His power armor glowed in a painful green like some gaudy-ass cactus on a cheap Mexican food neon sign.

"I'm Tiran Kandros, director of Nexus Security," he said as he sat down on the opposite side of the table. He wasn't wearing a weapon, at least not that could be seen. "And you're… Caelus Wolf?"

"Wolf," he answered nearly as quickly as the Turian could mention his name. He took his hand off the pistol and crossed his arms over his chest.

"Sounds almost Turian," the security director said.

"It's definitely not."

He was born a year before first contact with the Turians. A year before the _violent_ first contact with the Turians.

If his parents had known if Turian naming conventions all sounded slightly Roman, maybe they would have thought twice before naming him after some stupid sky god with a soft-sounding name. Academics. Couldn't just be normal people. Always looking back at ancient history with a hard-on made of nostalgia.

"Right, well," the Turian said as he flipped through the information on the datapad. "Born and raised on the Citadel. Degree from Citadel University in exoplanetary science. Approved for the Initiative in 2183. Assigned to a Nexus science team, secondary planet evaluation division. Third batch out of cryo. Assigned to a near-system survey team."

The director stopped reading aloud, flipped a little more through the datapad, then placed it down on the table, off. The Turian placed his elbows on the table and folded his hands together.

"What I don't see in your file is any military service," Kandros said.

"Don't have any," Wolf said.

Alliance had certainly come calling, early and often, in his younger days. During his teen years, he couldn't seem to go a single day without some kind of email from this recruiter or that recruiter. About once a week he would just "happen" to cross paths with someone on campus who could tell him more about opportunities in the officer training program and how it was never too late to enlist. Hell, he even had a general take him out for a steak dinner once.

They stopped calling in '76 after he finally - and emphatically - told them how they could take their goddamned Alliance flag, hoist it, and then shove up their own asses until they were flying half-mast.

The Alliance had done enough to mess up his life without him actually having to join it.

"I find that hard to believe," the Turian said, "considering you left a group of dead Kett back on that moon."

Wolf shrugged. "You can believe whatever you want."

When the olive-colored ship landed on the dusty moon's surface outside the research station, Wolf had warned them that nothing good was about to happen. The other three were hesitant, but Simmons was technically in charge and he read the Initiative primers like they were religious texts. They were supposed to follow "first contact protocol."

While he was out there trying to talk to the aliens, Wolf had instead quietly pulled the Sidewinder out from under his bunk, then grabbed a power cell from the storage cabinet and plugged it into his omni to run a personal shield system. By the time he got the shield booted up, he heard the first gunshot outside.

No one ever listened to him.

When the aliens forced open the door of the station to get the rest of them, he greeted them with the barrel of the six-shooter. He blew the heads off the first two before they even realized he had the drop on them. The other three others didn't go down quite as easily. But in the end, they were dead and he wasn't. All that mattered.

For maybe the first time ever, he appreciated that his parents had volunteered him to get his head cracked open so they could jam metal into his brain back when he was a kid.

Whoever those aliens were, they clearly didn't seem to know what biotics were. Or at least, they didn't seem like they had even seen it before. That was just the impression he got when that nova slammed the one into the side of the research station so hard the dented the metal in.

He heard that some of the Andromeda soldiers had flashy, new fifth-generation gear. Might have been nice to get one, if it wouldn't require some surgeon digging around in his head with an ice cream scoop to get the L3 out of his grey matter.

Wolf would have blown the alien shuttle to hell, too, if he had been able to figure out any of the foreign symbols and letters within the small landing craft. He didn't exactly want to sit there poking at buttons without knowing what they did. It was still sitting there, he guessed, if the Initiative wanted to go poke around it.

And so he puttered back into the Nexus in their little white shuttle with Szewczyk and Choy sitting in the back probably cleaning the shit out of their civies as they pondered how they were still alive at all. Neither of them could ever shut the hell up. By the time he got out of here, word would probably have already spread across the Nexus about their little alien encounter. Or maybe they were locked up somewhere getting their own interrogation, too.

"You have a problem, Wolf?" the Turian asked, obviously picking up on his demeanor.

"Aside from the Golden Worlds being a bust, drilling on some frosty-ass moon for three months looking for water that I told them wasn't there to begin with and being stuck here getting probed by a couple Turians?" Wolf shook his head. "Nope. No problems at all. I'm great. How are you?"

Kandros looked at him blankly for a moment, then waved his hand to the guard watching the door. The door whooshed quietly as it glided open, then click-clacked as it shut with the security officer on the other side of it.

"Were you aware the human ark came in?" Kandros asked.

Wolf snorted. "How could I miss it? They turned on the lights on the Nexus for the first time ever." He cocked his head to the side a little. "Well, at least since the dustup over who's in charge around here."

"And you chose the Nexus."

" _I_ didn't get to choose," Wolf corrected. " _I_ was out circling Korvath taking scans when everything went down, even though I remotely remember telling people that you can't colonize a planet that doesn't have an atmosphere. But nobody ever seems to listen to me around here."

Science, hell, even _basic_ science had gone right out the airlock when everyone got desperate. When Eos turned out to be a downright disaster, the Initiative small wigs started throwing everything at the wall in hopes something stuck. What about this clearly non-viable planet!? What about this moon that we never bothered looking at before because it's too small and too distant from the star? Maybe we could shoot off and look at this system even though we have no idea where that Scourge shit is between here and where we're trying to go?

Meanwhile everyone kept glancing out the windows hoping an ark would show up so they'd have a Pathfinder and a SAM to throw all their hope at.

If situations were different, maybe the Turian would have invited to give him a chauffeured ride to wherever the Nexus exiles were hold up now. But he wouldn't, Wolf knew, because the Nexus couldn't afford to lose anyone else, even if it wanted to. Not that he wanted to go, anyway. This wasn't exactly paradise, but last he had heard most of them landed out on Habitat 4, which, of course, had all the water that was promised in the recruitment vids, only that all of it was toxic.

The Turian didn't seem at all impressed with his attitude. He picked up the datapad again and began tapping through a few screens until he came to the page he was looking for. Kandros placed the pad down on the table and spun it so it was facing Wolf, then slid it across to him.

"Well here's a choice you can make," the director of security said as Wolf picked up the pad and looked over the form on it. "That's an order that you're to be returned to cryo. An ark may have come in, but the Superintendent doesn't want us using up any more supplies than are necessary. Considering that the survey teams haven't found anything worthwhile, she's pulling the plug."

Wolf scanned over the order on the datapad. It was brief. There was his name. There was the order to return to cryo. And there was the signature of the Superintendent. He tossed the datapad back across the table, letting it bounce twice before it slid back in front of Kandros.

Typical Andromeda.

Hey, wake up! No, wait, nevermind, go back to sleep!

Everyone around here had their heads stuck halfway up their asses.

"Super," Wolf said, pushing his chair back from the table so the legs screeched across the floor. "Can I go now? I suppose they've got my pod chilled and ready for me?"

"You can," Kandros said as he scooped up the datapad. "Or, I can override this order and reassign you."

No one did favors around here without expecting something in return, Wolf knew.

"What do you want?"

"As you know first hand, Heleus isn't as friendly as we hoped it would be," the Turian said. "In response, I've been authorized to form several small strike teams to deal with particular threats. The program is called APEX."

Wolf might have snorted again, if he didn't hold it in to not piss off the Turian any more. APEX? What a joke. The Initiative wasn't at the top of anything. And, from the murmurs he heard on his walk through the station about a rapid increase in alien attacks, humanity and its Milky Way colleagues weren't remotely close to being on the top of the food chain. Hell, they couldn't even put their feet down on dry land without the land killing them, too.

"I'm not a soldier," Wolf reminded him, as he had been forced to repeatedly remind the Alliance for all of those years.

"And my soldiers aren't scientists," Kandros countered. "I can't send the average tech onto a battlefield and expect them to come back. But you're not the average lab coat, are you?"

Wolf shrugged. What else could he do?

Either he signed up to go blasting through Heleus with the Turian's gun jockeys or he went back into the box for another deep freeze. With the way things had been going, there was a good chance they'd never thaw him out again. More likely that, at some point, the batteries on the Nexus would run out of juice for good and he and everyone else in the freezer would warm up the slow way until the entire station smelled of rotten meat.

That, or go exile. If, and a big if, he was able to figure a way to break out of Nexus security and get to a shuttle to even get off the damn Nexus. But again, flying out there with even fewer resources than the Initiative to a world filled with poison water didn't sound particularly endearing, either. That was a dog eat dog mess to get into and, frankly, he didn't want to have to constantly be glancing around waiting to see who was going to try to clock him upside the jaw or, predictably, shoot him in the back.

Kandros continued, despite Wolf's indifference. "Pathfinder Ryder has managed to stabilize the environment on Eos. How, I'm not exactly sure, but radiation levels are down and the violent sandstorms have abated. But that's also allowed the Kett to gain a foothold."

Of course it had, Wolf thought.

"They have several power stations feeding energy up to a main base in the cliffs, but it's too fortified for us to move on," Kandros said. He pulled up a map on his omni, displaying the holo into the air between them.

"But there are a series of outposts here in the Presson Dunes," he said as he pointed to the flat area on the west side of his map. "We've been tracking ships coming in and out of a big installment here, but we don't know why. As far as we can tell, there's nothing of interest out there."

"And what do you need me for, exactly?" Wolf asked, trying to cut to the point.

"Clear out the Kett. Recover any data we can find. Figure out what they're doing," Kandros said.

That didn't exactly answer his question as to why they needed _him_ , but considering the options laid before him, getting shot to death by aliens the middle of the desert probably was still the best of the choices he had available. That, in itself, painted a pretty depressing picture of how his life had turned out to this point.

Andromeda was turning out just to be another shade of "kill or be killed."

Exactly the opposite of what he was hoping for.

"Fine," he answered, not making any effort to mask his frustration at being used.

If Kandros was bothered by that last bit of attitude, he didn't make any indication of it. "We'll get you fitted for a combat suit before takeoff tomorrow. Just show up back here at Security at O-eight-hundred."

Wolf shoved his chair out from under the table and headed for the door.

* * *

"I can't wait to see you tomorrow. Miss you. Love you."

"Love you too, babe," Wolf said, then tapped the button on his omni to shut it down.

When the orange light from the omni dimmed, he sat alone in the dark for a moment on the edge of the rigid mattress. He scratched his fingers across the left side of his head, across the narrow band of skin just above his left ear where the hair didn't grow, along the fault line where they had made the incision into his head as a teenager. There wasn't a noticeable scar there any more, only the narrow missing patch of hair to alert people that something wasn't quite right.

The tiny Nexus apartment was pitch black without the omni. There were no windows. No furnishings beyond what was bolted to the floor. There was a light, but he hadn't bothered to turn it on.

Wolf sighed.

He was in a whole new galaxy.

He couldn't shake the familiar feeling of the Milky Way.

* * *

Wolf cracked open the cases of lab equipment, recalling each of the locations where he had placed components.

He wished he could have figured out a way to hide a bottle of whiskey in there too without raising any flags on the scanners. A handle filled with liquid never would have made it past the docks managers doing inventory of everything going aboard the nexus.

A rifle, however, broken down into individual components and separated across a handful of cargo containers filled with science equipment the average clipboard commando wouldn't know what to do with even if he did know what they were, made it through without a question.

Call it paranoia, but the expectation that something like this was bound to happen coming true made him look pretty goddamn smart. No doubt the Nexus soldiers would want to give him one of those flimsy-ass Avenger rifles. The thing could barely chip the paint off a car, much less kill something.

In contrast, his M-13 had the range of a long gun and carried some of the pop, but handled and fired like a rifle. He had only ever shot the thing at the range, but he didn't have to be some Alliance jarhead to know a good firearm when he saw it.

He couldn't remember exactly what caused the premonition that led him to breaking it down to components and stowing it for travel to Andromeda. Maybe it was him - the him in the moment he walked out of Nexus Security - sending a telepathic warning into the past to himself that, guess what?, the shit that you didn't want to happen is going to happen to you in 634 years.

The gun had showed up at his apartment one day in a large, nondescript white box. When he had opened the box and then opened the hard case inside, the rifle was sitting inside a mold along with four loaded magazines.

There was a simple note accompanying it.

 _Mr. Wolf,_

 _Please accept this rifle as a thank you for your contributions to the cause._

It wasn't signed. There was no address on the package. At the time, he couldn't even find any public information about what type of rifle it was. When he had taken it out to the range to test it out, he attracted a lot of lurid gazes and a lot of questions about where he had gotten such a purty gun that he didn't have adequate answers to. He didn't go back, after that.

He couldn't say precisely where it had come from, but he had a pretty good idea. After the shuttle crash that killed his parents, he had received a request for a full copy of their research on immediate and ongoing effects of the eezo disaster on Yandoa. He would have discounted it as some kind of email scan and trashed it if it had not also come with a sizable - and real - deposit into his personal bank account with a promise of more.

After compiling the volumes and volumes of patients files, audio recordings and journal articles and selling them, he had received another simple enough offer, requesting some planetary scans of little-charted worlds on the edges of the galaxy. Again, they came with promises of almost obscene compensation.

When he had completed those, he had finally received an invitation to sit down over drinks with Dr. Alex Montagne, who had made him another job offer, a more permanent position working in a research facility. It continued sounding too-good-to-be-true. Help advance humanity's progress across the galaxy. Neuter Batarian power in Terminus and the Traverse. Dampen the influence and financial power of the Asari. Produce technological breakthroughs ahead of the Salarians. And lessen the military dominance of the Turians.

Wolf might have shook his hand and agreed to all of it.

And then the doctor said the word "paramilitary."

Wolf drained the rest of his glass of expensive, smokey scotch, slid the empty glass across the table and promptly told the doctor he could take his offer and promptly shove it up his ass.

The rifle showed up at his apartment three days later.

Wolf couldn't decide whether its appearance was meant as an insult. Probably not. For it to be an insult, some bullets-for-brains so-and-so would have had to have a novel thought that guns weren't the answer to every problem in the galaxy.

And yet, here he was now, having smuggled the rifle across two-and-a-half million light years as he snapped the last components together. He hoisted the gun to his shoulder and peered down the scope as he calibrated the sights after a long, long sleep in storage.

Wolf pointed it at the wall, pressing his finger lightly onto the trigger until the red dot from the laser sight appeared as he tested the tension. He continued to press until the empty firing mechanisms clicked in action and the rifle gently moved against his shoulder.

"Kelly," he said to activate the VI installed in his omni. "Play saved audio message, April 12, 2186, 10:53 p.m."

"Yes, Wolf," the feminine voice responded, "Playing."

"Hi Cae. I miss you. Hope you're having fun with your friends tonight. But not _too_ much fun. I got a text from my brother that I can't even read. Tell him he better not still be drunk at the wedding tomorrow."

There's a short pause for a quiet, short, beautiful chuckle that dumps ice water through his veins every time he hears it.

"I can't believe it's finally here. I just want you to know that-"

She stops talking as she's interrupted by feminine shouting from behind her. He can hear Alison clearly yell to "Let the guy live a little!"

"Sorry, I've got to go," she apologizes.

Isabelle shouts in the background, "Hang up!"

"I can't wait to see you tomorrow. Miss you. Love you."

The audio file ends with the sound of fingers touching buttons before it crackles off.

Wolf lowered the rifle, resting it across his lap as he leans backward, sitting on top of the desk in the dim science lab. Aside from the company of a half-dozen open crates scattered around the room, the lab is empty.

He opened his hands letting the rifle clatter to the floor. He glanced down into his lap as he reached over, twisting the black brushed tungsten ring on his left hand with the fingertips of his right.

He had a few still pictures saved in storage on his omni from the few days that followed, but the call was the last bit of audio.

It was the last remnant of her voice he had left.

Maybe his plan to run away from the Milky Way would have worked if he hadn't been unable to purge the data and bury the memories. When his finger had hovered above the delete button, looking at the 45 photos, video clips and saved voice messages that remained, his pulse raced and he felt like he was going to throw up. In the end, he couldn't bring himself to erase them.

He couldn't erase her.

"Kelly," he said, addressing the VI he had named after her.

That was yet another decision that made forgetting all but impossible.

"Play it again, please."


	2. Chapter 2

**Two**

Wolf wasn't quite sure why he had hoped he wouldn't get stuck with Turians.

The squad leader was a Turian. The gunner was a Turian. The shuttle pilot was a Turian.

The only person who wasn't a Turian was the squad's second-in-command. And she wasn't human. She was Asari and she gave the impression that she'd been shooting shit for a couple centuries before coming to Andromeda.

About half of the original Nexus staff were humans and the human ark was the only one that had come in, but of course APEX was stuffed with aliens.

Figured.

Humans didn't have an ounce of patience and the second everything on the Nexus started going to shit, they were the first ones to start griping. Well, second, after the Krogan, but the Krogan had their own reasons for being pissed off and that reason was Salarian.

He wondered why he hadn't thought this through a little more back before they pointed at a blip of light in the sky and shot off on a one-way journey. "Hey, we've all got a bunch of bad blood in the Milky Way but I'm sure if we cram all of the species that have unresolved issues with each other into a big spaceship together everyone will be best friends by the time we reach Andromeda!" That sounded so fucking stupid now. Why didn't it sound stupid 634 years ago?

Maybe that would have worked if everyone got the paradise planet they were promised.

But nobody got anything they wanted, so everyone was reminded of all the ways that they didn't like everyone else.

"Alright Echo team, let's go over the mission specs one last time."

Norican Rexard felt like the right person cast into the role of leader. Or, at least, he felt like a soldier who had seen plenty of fights. The Turian had a set of scars that looked like claw marks along the flange on the left side of his face. His steel-toned plates were slashed with a bit of red across the cheeks. He wasn't wearing the standard-issue Initiative armor. Instead he had one of those obnoxiously bright suits of power armor, with a red light around the collar. It made Wolf wonder, did these Turians ever go on a night mission when, you know, glowing like a Christmas tree would alert the enemy?

At his side, clinging like a babe, was the other Turian. Gallus Ispania wasn't quite as tall and he didn't look nearly as old, although Wolf had to admit he was shit for trying to figure out how old Turians were. They all looked the same. At least this one didn't have a set of glow-armor. But his yellow and black armor did look like it had a slightly larger than normal jump jet set on the back of it. Gallus had a more beige complexion, with two black streaks down each of his mandibles and one streak that ran up the center of his head crests.

Both of them were carrying those shitty Alliance Avengers. The younger Turian's had a scope mounted on the top of it. Norican had a set of three frag grenades at his side. Gallus was carrying some kind of hand cannon that didn't look like anything a human or Turian had produced.

The Asari, Vela Tidana, wore a deep blue armor that looked almost black. Kind of the way that the giant black hole at the center of Heleus looked black, but also looked kind of blue or purple around the edges depending on the angle you had to look at it.. Her skin looked more purple that a lot of the Asari he had run across back on the Citadel, but maybe that was just the due to the darkness of space bleeding in through the windows. She had white markings around her eyes and two V-like patterns of white across her forehead, that also trickled back across her head crests in dots. She sat in the back corner of the shuttle with her arms crossed over her chest and her legs crossed. She wore a pistol at one hip and a submachine gun at the other. She had one of those sleek Asari swords that hung at her lower back. Her eyes were closed as if she were meditating or sleeping.

And then there was him. The Initiative armor they gave him was white with Andromeda blue accents. The Nexus Security folks had fitted it nearly perfectly to him. Still, the entire suit felt rigid and stiff. And even though he knew it was made out of extra-light materials, it still weighed much more than his own, normal, non-military skin.

They had also asked him where he had gotten the weapons. He didn't bother answering them as he dropped the six-shooter into the holster at his right hip and spun the folded-up Raptor behind his back until the magnetic clasp grabbed onto it and pulled it tightly to his right shoulder blade.

"Hopefully we'll be able to drop before the Kett can realize we're there," Norican reviewed. "Expect things to get hot quickly. Stay in cover and advance on my orders. Ispania, you'll cover my left side. Tidana, you've got the right."

The Turian turned to him. "Wolf, you bring up the rear. We'll do what we can to keep you out of trouble, but any supporting fire you can give us with the long gun will be appreciated."

Translation: Stay out of the way.

That was fine by him. Hell, maybe if he got shot, Kandros would rethink dropping him into the middle of a battlefield.

"We'll breach the facility from the south. Neutralize any Kett inside. Then we take whatever data we can find and get out." Norican was succinct and bland. He reminded Wolf of the Alliance trainers who had worked with him month after month after the surgeons had jammed metal in his brain. Do this. Do that. Do this again. Do that a third time. Order after order after order. Get it done, move on to the next thing. "Does everyone understand?"

"Yes, sir!" Gallus immediately responded. If there were prizes for kissing ass, he'd take the trophy.

"Understood," Vela followed, without lifting her head up or opening her eyes from her corner.

"Got it," Wolf said.

"We're approaching Eos," the pilot said from the cockpit.

Wolf looked out of the front windshield, seeing the dusty tan planet increasing in size in front of them, slightly backlit by the large, orange sun behind it. It was a desert, he knew, but at least it had a bit more character than anywhere the Nexus had sent him up to this point. Ice cold moons, rocky terrestrial planets that might as well have been moons, poisonous oven planets with atmospheres so thick he could barely get reads on the ground underneath the thick clouds.

Eos was at least halfway Earth-like. In shape, at least. Not so much in environment. The first two batches of settlers had fatefully found it to be less than hospitable.

"Preparing our descent," the pilot said as the shuttle dipped and then thumped a little bit as it hit the first of the atmosphere.

Norican shuffled toward the door, reaching up toward one of the loops bolted into the ceiling as the shuttle rocked back and forth while the windows were covered in a wreath of flame. He turned his head and looked back toward Wolf.

"You should hold onto something," the Turian said. "It's going to be a rocky dive down."

* * *

Wolf popped up from behind the low wall, peering down the scope of the Raptor as he scanned the open doorway.

He didn't see any movement inside. He pulled the rifle down, glancing at the dead Kett in front of the door and those spread down the walkway. He looked at the mangled head on the one that he had picked off when it had popped up from cover and sprayed hot plasma rounds down toward his Asari squadmate.

"Clear," Norican announced even as he continued to sweep right and left while peering down the barrel of his gun. He slipped out of his cover and began to quickly pace up the walkway, gun trained on the open doorway.

Gallus and Vela popped up too and began to move, while Wolf waited until they began to head up the walkway before he began to follow. He glanced back over his shoulder, looking at the massive Kett fortress on the cliffs and the red shield that surrounded it. Nothing lifting off from there. Yet.

Norican pressed himself against the wall on the left side of the door, then quickly peered around the corner. He quickly bent back as three red-hot rounds spilled out of the inside.

"At least four hostiles inside," Norican said into the comms, too calmly for a man who just nearly took a couple shots to the head.

Wolf instinctively dropped down, pressing his shoulder into one of the large cargo containers as soon as the shots fired out. He could feel his heart rate spike and feel the anxious sweat push up through his skin.

It was on oddly familiar feeling.

"Frag out," Norican announced as he tossed the grenade around the corner. Three. Two. One. As the explosive burst, he followed it into the room, the sound of his rifle popping somewhat dampened by the walls and distance between him and Wolf.

"Moving!" Gallus shouted over comms as he charged ahead, heading for the same spot outside the door where Norican had just been. Wolf could see Vela moving too, heading toward the opposite side.

He better move, too, he figured, if everyone was pushing up the field. Wolf rolled out from behind the crate, folding and shoving the Raptor into his right shoulder. He reached down and pulled his pistol, eyeing a Kett energy barrier just outside the doorway but far enough back that he likely wouldn't get caught in the middle of any kind of burgeoning firefight.

As he ran up the gangway, he could hear the back and forth exchange of gunfire between his squadmates and the Kett, as well as the crackle and whoosh of dark energy being drawn out, shaped and thrown by Vela.

He forced himself up against the energy barrier, dropping the sidearm back into the holster and drawing the rifle again. Wolf bent around the left side of the barrier, fixing his eye down the scope and looking inside of the open door. He slipped back into cover when he couldn't see anything between the dark inside and the haze from the frag.

Wolf got the first whiff of smoke from the grenade.

If there was one thing he remember more than anything, it was the smell of smoke.

Elysium was burning. Thick plumes of black billowed off of destroyed buildings as entire blocks of the colony burned. The air was so thick with smoke that every breath seemed to burn inside his chest.

It wasn't so different, then and now. Then, like now, he had sat pressed in cover with the unfamiliar feeling of a firearm in his hands. He sat, listening for gunfire and watching for any movement around the flanks. He was surrounded by other men and women he didn't know at all, each of them in the same situation he was.

None of had been soldiers. They had come to Elysium for a vacation. They had been enjoying sunlight and beaches, eclectic shops and casual outdoor cafes. They were taking time off from work or celebrating anniversaries or just escaping the day-to-day of Earth or the Citadel or wherever else they came from.

Or honeymooning.

He didn't recall any of the brochures for the resort saying anything like "Swimming, boating, spa treatments, fine dining and exciting, unexpected Batarian pirate raids!" He had never even considered that Elysium might be dangling out there, perilously close to hostile space. He had grown up on the Citadel, where the different species lived together in relative harmony and there was never any notable threat outside your front door except some limited, petty street crime.

And then he was thrust in the middle of ships burning streaks through the sky, bombs and missiles detonating as they smashed down into buildings and Batarian soldiers landing and storming the colony with loud, heavy guns blazing.

That was day three of his supposed-to-be five-day vacation. Days four and five were spent trying to not get killed, before the Alliance was able to secure everything and get him evacuated off-planet. He left Elysium with absolutely nothing he landed with at the start of his trip.

His marriage lasted a grand total of four days.

He had originally suggested going to Earth. Earth was so blase, Kelly said. She had grown up there and traveled frequently to visit family. Elysium was new and gorgeous and pastoral unlike overcrowded, overdone Earth. She provided backup in the form of support from her parents and friends that Elysium would be much better. He conceded defeat because he didn't have anyone backing his opinion.

No one ever listened to him.

"Clear!" Norican announced again.

Wolf spun out of his cover and jogged up the ramp to inside the Kett outpost building, where the smell of smoke was even thicker. He coughed and waved his hand in front of his face to try to clear it. There was a big, black burn mark in the center of the room where the grenade had gone off.

There were four dead Kett on the far side of the room, three of them riddled with bullet holes. The fourth looked slightly crumpled, lying on the floor with a broken exo-skeleton underneath a deep dent in the wall that spoke of Vela's handiwork.

Wolf couldn't exactly say what the Kett were doing here, but the room offered some strong suggestions that seemed incredibly grim. In one corner there were three tables, looking like exam tables. Exam tables with manacles one the sides and at the bottom of each. They were all empty now, but one of them was bloodstained red.

And leaning up against the walls were several pods, each about eight feet tall, with small viewing windows toward the top.

"Are those… stasis pods?" Gallus asked as he approached one, reaching out his clawed hand to touch the front of it. He lifted up on his toes, peeking into the glass. "Empty."

"They're definitely Kett-make," Vela said as she examined a touch pad on the side of another pod. "The Kett aren't native to Heleus. Maybe they came here like us, in stasis."

"I wouldn't be so sure," Wolf said as he stepped closer to the exam tables, looking at the stains. Red, just as he had thought from a distance. He glanced over his shoulder, looking at the dead Kett and the brownish-green sludge pooled around them.

The only other species that bled red was Quarian, and there were no Quarians on Eos.

"Kelly, give me a scan," he said as he pointed his omni at the table. "Can you verify species?"

The omni blipped and beeped for a short second. "DNA sequencing matches human genome, 99.99 percent certainty," the VI responded.

"Yeah," Wolf said to himself. "That's what I thought."

"There's another door here, but it's locked," Gallus said from the opposite side of the room. He leaned closer to it. "Sounds like someone is on the other side."

"Stay alert," Norican said. "Could be more Kett."

Wolf stepped back from the exam tables and glanced, taking a look at another piece of machinery near the tables. There was a thin, transparent screen on the top of it and what looked like several keys on the body. A computer, maybe?

He glanced down at the foreign symbols on the keys. "Anything you can do to decipher this, Kelly?"

The omni lit as it scanned the panel, before the VI answered. "Unable to translate. I require more inputs."

He reached down and pressed a button akin to where the "enter" key would be on a typical Milky Way keyboard with no effect. Well, what was the worst that could happen? Self-destruct maybe, but that seemed unlikely. They had already cleared out the Kett, so even if tampering set off some kind of local alarm, it wouldn't be a big deal.

He began punching buttons until the screen flickered on as if it were waking up out of sleep mode. Several images appeared on the screen, along with more of the foreign symbols he didn't quite understand.

"What did you find, Wolf?" Norican asked as he stepped up behind him, glancing at the screen.

"Some type of computer, I guess," he said, not wanting to touch any more of the buttons now that it was on, for fear of messing it up. "Kelly, can you access the data?"

"One moment," the VI answered. "Yes. No security detected."

"Let's take it all," he said. "Full download."

"Downloading..." He watched as the progress bar begin to clip upward on his omni. "Wolf, I have located some files that appear to contain audio. Would you like me to play them?"

"Sure."

The file began to play with some of the same harsh-sounding kett language he had heard before, deep and guttural sounding. There was a pause, followed by more of the croaking. Then, something different.

" _I don't understand. What do you want?"_ A man's voice, sounding scared. That perked up everyone's ears.

"Is that-"Gallus began before Wolf cut him off.

"A human."

The Kett started speaking again, short, harsh words.

" _I'm with the An-drom-e-da I-niti-a-tive,"_ the human said slowly. " _We're settlers from the Mil-ky Way gal-ax-y."_ More Kett. It sounded like a second voice had entered the conversation, slightly higher than the first they heard.

" _Where did you take the others? What do you want from us?"_

More Kett back-and-forth. The lower-voiced one barked something again.

" _I don't… wait, what are you doing? Wait! No! Stop!"_ The man cried out in pain, followed by a long, howling scream.

"Kelly, stop playback," Wolf said before it got too much further in.

He had a pretty good idea what the rest of the audio was going to sound like as he glanced back at the exam table.

Norican lifted his head. "The Nexus wasn't able to retrieve the bodies from the attacks on the failed outposts," he said. "Orbital scans didn't locate any bodies. We figured the sandstorms were to blame for that."

The comms buzzed in before anyone could say anything else on the topic.

"Echo team, this is Kandros. Scans from Prodromos are showing activity at the Kett fortress. Looks like you stirred up the nest. Prepare for extraction, ETA two minutes."

"Time to go," Norican said. "Back to the LZ."

"What about this door?" Gallus asked.

"No time. We're leaving."

Wolf glanced at his omni as the download completed and the screen on the console went dark. "Got the data," he said as he pulled his rifle off his back and began to step backward from the computer.

As he lifted his eyes up, he glanced out the viewing window back onto the sand outside and a ramp extending from what he assumed was the back door of whatever room lay on the other side of the door Gallus couldn't open.

There were some Kett coming down the ramp quickly, moving toward a landed dropship further away from the ramp.

When they got to the bottom of the ramp and onto the dunes, that's when Wolf noticed that they were carrying something. Something large, rectangular and about eight feet long.

"The Kett are taking a pod out of here," he said as he jerked the Raptor to his shoulder and peered down the scope. As he got a closer look, it was just as he thought. The side panels and the shape of the container looked just like the other empty boxes that were standing in this room.

"What?" Norican asked.

"A stasis pod! They have a stasis pod!" Wolf shouted back. "They're carrying it out."

"No time. Shuttle is inbound. We need to extract before those dropships lift off from the base."

"And what if there's a settler in there?" Wolf challenged as he followed the Kett with the scope, watching them moving slowly as they lugged the heavy metal container.

"By the time we backtrack and go around it'll be too late," the Turian squad leader said.

He was right, Wolf knew. They didn't have enough time to head back out the door, around the walkway to the back of the complex, jump the Kett and investigate the pod. It was too far.

It was too far, if they went out the way they came.

Wolf pulled the trigger on the Raptor, spraying two rounds through the window and into the back of the head of one of the Kett carrying the pod. A spray of brown-green blood burst out of the back of its skull and the corner of the pod it was carrying dropped onto the ground as it tumbled forward.

"Wolf! What are you-"

The rest of Norican's sentence was cut off as the mass effect field began to wrap around him like a shell and time fell away into a single, frozen second.


	3. Chapter 3

**Three**

Everything slowed as he curled the fingers on his right hand into a fist and pulled his arm back toward his shoulder.

The blue field spun around him as he rotated his left shoulder forward, watching as the other Kett moved at a hundredth of the speed of normal time.

He could feel his blood churning in him, almost like boiling water as the implant in his hand charged the eezo and manipulated the dark energy that flowed from it. The biotic shell tightened around him, suspending him in a bubble held tautly on the edge of time.

He locked his eyes on the Kett on the farthest side of the pod as time came to a nearly total standstill. He could feel the tension around the edge of the field, as if he was suspended on a cord being pulled back until it was nearly ready to snap. He crouched slightly, readying himself for that one, final moment when the equilibrium broke.

It was the first of the experimental maneuvers he was asked to try years ago, when the L3 in his brain was shiny and new and still so vastly unknown.

It was still his favorite.

The mass effect field snapped, throwing him forward, twisting him through the shattered glass of the viewing window and out into the Eosian sun. He could see the sand parting, blown to either side as the biotic field shredded air like a bullet, carrying him closer and closer to the Kett still frozen on the edge of a single second.

Everything stopped, jarring forward as his feet touched back onto the ground and the tip of the field crashed into the Kett he had lined up. He braced his feet into the ground as the biotic field ruptured, bursting force as time began to accelerate again, until the Kett began to inch forward, then shifted faster and faster until the roar of the explosion filled his eardrums and he could feel the whoosh of wind wash over him.

The Kett soldiers seemed stunned, now that Wolf was directly on top of them. Before they could realize who he was or figure out where he came from or lift a gun to put him down, Wolf was already off his feet, leaping into the air.

He raised his right knee, bent slightly. His right arm began to rise up over his head. He curled his fingers into a fist. With each motion, the eezo in his blood began to stir and activate again, jolted by the implant at the practiced, familiar set of movements.

The first Kett lifted its rifle as Wolf began to descend back toward the ground. Too little, too late as it hurtled through the air, arms and legs rag-dolling as it was blasted away by the explosion of the nova as his fist drove into the ground.

Wolf pressed the rifle to his shoulder, tracking the Kett as they tumbled back toward the ground and bounced off sand and stone. He pummeled each with a series of rounds from the gun, watching blooms of green-brown goop plume out of them until they made no effort to stand.

"Wolf! Get back here! We need to extract!" he could hear Norican yelling into the comm as he saw the Turian's red armor emerge from around the side of the outpost. He ignored it, bending down toward the dropped stasis pod as he looked into the glass viewing window.

A human woman lay inside, eyes closed, as if she were peacefully sleeping.

"It's a woman!" he shouted back into his comm as he dropped to his knees, lying in the dust as he examined the touch panel on the side of the box. It was covered with the same foreign Kett symbols that the console inside had been.

"Sky, this is Echo Team leader, requesting delay in extraction. Repeat, delay extraction until my mark." Norican's orders rang through his comm as Wolf examined the buttons and pads on the side of the stasis pod.

He began to touch the pad, watching as the button lit with each press of his finger, but nothing happened. He pressed another sequence of buttons randomly, watching as it lit and beep and blipped and ultimately didn't respond.

"Fuck this shit!" he shouted at the panel.

Wolf forced himself back to his feet, spinning the rifle in his hands and began to slam the butt of it down against the side where the lid connected to the frame. He lifted the gun, thrusting it down over and over and over trying to break the seal.

"Come!" Bang. "On!" Bang. "You!" Bang. "Bitch!" Bang. Bang. Bang.

The dull green metal showed just minimal signs of scratches and dents, while the stock on his rifle had taken a far worse share of the punishment. He could hear the sounds of armor flexing behind him as the rest of the team approached, while also hearing the distant buzz of ships in the air.

He folded the rifle and snapped it to his back, then crouched down to one knee again as he clenched his right fist and pushed his power into it. He grabbed the top of the stasis pod with his left hand to hold it steady as he swirling the field around his bent in knuckles.

The first punch left a sizable dent. The second depressed it even farther. The third cracked the seal, creating a small open space between the two pieces of metal.

He changed the trajectory of his fist, punching down to depress the broken lip until the gap widened, the impact of each punch sending tremors up his entire arm.

"Kett dropships!" Gallus called out as the humming of engines grew louder and the green craft bobbing through the scorching Eosian air came into view for the first time from the southeast.

"Wolf!" Norican.

"I'm almost," he punched again. "Done!" With a sharp uppercut under the bashed and broken metal, he hooked his knuckles under the edge of the lid. The hinges cracked loudly as the metal buckled under the stress and shattered, the large, heavy lid popping off and over the case into the sand with a quiet thud.

"Sky, this is Echo Team. We need that evac. _Now."_ Norican.

The woman was young, like almost everyone in the Initiative, but she looked younger than him. Her long-sleeved uniform was a dull charcoal grey with a black block at the shoulders and down the sleeves. The light blue Andromeda Initiative logo was on the right side of her chest.

There were two or three different lights blinking inside the pod until both flashed and held steady red. As they did, the woman's eyes openly suddenly as she gasped in her first breath, gripped with a sudden terror.

"Come on," Wolf said as he extended his hand down. "You've got to come with me."

Maybe she was just trusting, or maybe she remembered in that moment how she ended up in the pod in the first place, but she didn't hesitate to move her right arm and clasp her fingers around his as he pulled her up into a sitting position.

Shadows washed over him followed by a whoosh of air as the Kett dropships dipped and cruised to the open sand just to his north, stopping and hovering over the ground. The woman looked back, taking notice of the Kett as they stepped into the open bay doors of the dropships and prepared to jump down.

Her face washed in a blank terror. It wasn't the first time she had seen those aliens. He could be sure of that.

"We've got to go, now," Wolf said.

"Yeah," she agreed as he gave another tug and she lifted to her feet. She stepped over the edge of the broken stasis pod and onto the sand, where her legs immediately folded underneath her and she started to fall before Wolf caught her.

The Kett were jetting down from the dropship as he tried to support her back to her feet. One of the Kett burst backward as a concussive shot struck it in mid-air from Norican's rifle, the Turian wasting no time to engage the enemy.

"My legs are numb," the woman said as she tried to stand again, but collapsed heavy onto Wolf's right arm.

"Wolf, get out of there!" Norican shouted into the comm.

He was exposed. No cover. Nothing but wide open sand between his squadmates behind him and the Kett in front of him. The aliens touched the ground, barking their gruff alien commands and the first began to raise its gun. The dropships lifted back into the air.

"I've got you," Wolf promised as he tucked his left arm around the woman, bringing his forearm up across his flank and clenching his fingers into a fist. He gritted his teeth as he pulled the power out, spreading the aegis out from his arm to shield both of them just as the first shots pinged off the barrier and reflected back toward the Kett.

He began to shuffle backward, the woman supported in his right arm, step by step. The Kett scrambled for cover as their shots bounced back toward them and his squadmates pummeled their position with covering fire. The woman dragged her feet at first, but each step he took she tried to follow with her own feet until she was slowly resting more and more of her own weight on them.

"Where is that shuttle?" Norican called into his comms.

"Inbound to your position now," the Turian pilot answered. "I'm… shit… hold on-"

Wolf looked back up over his shoulder as he continued inching away, spotting the white Andromeda shuttle diving down from the sky with flames still licking off its body from the sharp, fast descent. Then there was a short burst, a rupture of metal into the air as the rear right engine erupted in flames.

"Prodromos, this is Sky," the Turian pilot called through the comm with the blaring and beeping of alarms in the cockpit audible behind his flanged voice. "I'm down an engine. I'm coming in too hot. I'm going to try to set her down soft but not sure I'll be able to get her back up. Send- shit!"

The shuttle twirled and spiraled down toward the ground as the good engine pushed it into a spin. The pilot cut the power and righted it, jerking hard to get the nose of the shuttle to come up. It began to bend upward, but not nearly fast enough as the front of the ship slammed into the ground and skipped before coming to rest in the sand east of the Kett outpost and meters away from the intended extraction point.

"Tidana, Ispania, get to the shuttle!" Norican shouted, ignoring the likely fact that it was trashed.

The Kett continued to pound Wolf's aegis as he struggled to hold it. Each shot that ricocheted off the barrier felt like someone jabbing him in the ribs with a blunt prod, one on top of the other until each little painless jab piled up to become one massive ache.

Wolf's arm shook as he began to lose his grip on the shield. His shield would protect him from a couple shots from a Kett rifle, but the woman was completely defenseless if he dropped it.

"I can walk," the woman said as she lifted almost all of her weight off his arm.

"Can you run?" Wolf asked, the more pertinent question.

"I think so," she said, not sounding nearly as sure as he would have liked to hear.

Norican rushed past their right side, dropping to a knee as he tossed a power cell down into the sand, a hard-light barrier spreading out in front of him in an arc.

"Go!" the Turian commander shouted. "I'll hold them back!"

Norican punched a fresh thermal clip into his Avenger, pressed the stock against his shoulder in perfect firing form, and began to empty the magazine at the Kett.

"I'll be right behind you," Wolf said to the woman as he let her go and stepped in between her and the Kett, then lowered his arm to drop the aegis. As it went down, he lifted his right arm, grabbing his pistol from his hip holster as he unloaded six rounds into the rocks where the Kett were hiding in cover just keep them there as the woman lowered her head and began to sprint toward the smoking shuttle.

"Norican!" he shouted to the Turian.

The squad leader ducked under the lip of his barrier as he popped a spent thermal clip out, pulled the pin of a grenade, tossed it over his head back toward the Kett without looking at where it was going, while he grabbed another magazine from his belt and slammed it into the gun. "Get to the shuttle! That's an order!"

Wolf ducked as three red-hot Kett rounds whizzed wide over his head, then turned on his heel and bolted toward the shuttle too.

When he got to the bay doors that Vela and Gallus had pried open, he noticed the scorching down the entire back quarter panel around the engine. The front of the shuttle was smashed in and the windshield was cracked, but not broken out. The sand might have padded it slightly as it crash landed and skipped. Both Vela and Gallus were inside the doors, weapons drawn, looking out toward where the Kett were still exchanging fire with Norican.

"Pilot's dead," Vela informed him. As Wolf peeked inside, he could see blue blood splattered across the dash and the windshield, where he obviously slammed forward on impact.

"Doesn't matter. No way this shuttle is lifting off." Gallus said grimly.

The woman from the pod stepped back, arching backward to peer down the side of the crashed shuttle. She glanced up and down, then back at them. "Don't be so sure about that," she said and then scampered toward the engine, prying off a panel.

"What are you doing?" Gallus asked as he looked at her on her knees in the sand poking around at the shuttle's components with her omni. Sparks were flying as she was cutting something with a laser from the tool.

"I'm getting us out of here. These Kodiaks are tougher than they look. And if we're lucky…" she said as a large spark snapped back off the panel nearly hitting her right cheek as if it objected, "This cranky bitch can still get up."

"And who's going to fly it?" Gallus followed.

"I am," the woman said confidently as she tweaked another piece and leaned back, spraying the side of the ship with a little cryo-powder to cool it.

She hopped inside the open bay of the shuttle, yanking the dead Turian pilot out of his seat and dragging him to the doors where she rolled him out into the sand.

"What are you doing?" Gallus protested.

"We can't handle any extra weight," she said as she plopped into the pilot's seat, ignoring the blue Turian blood smeared all over it and the switches she was flipping. "He's dead. We'll be lucky if I can get this bird in the sky with the five of us. Toss out anything back there we don't need."

Vela didn't hesitate to start working the connectors on the seats and pulling them up from the locks in the floor and chucking them out into the sand. Wolf grabbed a crate - didn't know what was in it, didn't care - and hurled that backward too.

"Wait," Gallus tried to stop. "Wait! Who are you, anyway?"

The woman in the cockpit flipped two more switches above her head, followed by a cranking and whirring noise as the engines tried to kick up again, sputtered, then engaged with a loud, knocking hum. It groaned and creaked, but the shuttle levitated a little off the sand, nearly spilling the unbalanced Gallus out the open door.

"Niomi Long," she shouted backward as she continued working the controls. "Initiative pilot. I flew supplies in and out of Resilience before the attack."

"Norican, we're ready to extract," Wolf said into his comm.

"Copy," the squad leader answered. "En route."

Wolf hopped into the open bay doors, glancing up into the cockpit as Niomi tried to wipe the Turian blood off the glass in front of her with her sleeve. "No way this thing is spaceworthy," she said as she looked at the cracks.

"There's an outpost nearby," Wolf told her. "Prodromos. It's in the Fairwind Basin."

Niomi gave a nod as she settled back into the seat, gripping the controls tightly with both hands. "Let's hope we can limp there."

Norican came into view around the side of the outpost, gun still blaring at the Kett. Wolf could see the blue buzz of his shield as he took fire from the Kett as the Turian backpedaled quickly toward the shuttle. He would have moved faster if he just turn and ran, but Wolf knew fucking Turians never turned their back to a fight.

Another red-hot thermal clip dropped down toward the sand as Norican reached for another magazine, still retreating backward. He lifted his hand to shove it in, but never made it there as the first shot penetrated his shield and struck him in the left shoulder, staggering him.

"Norican!" Gallus shouted from his side as he lurched forward toward the open bay door.

The second shot hit Norican in the chest, pushing him backward, followed by a third and a fourth that hit his right shoulder and began to spin him the other way. The Avenger fell out of his hand when the fifth shot hit him just above his left elbow. The sixth send a spray of blue blood up out of the top of the left side of his head as he tumbled and fell into the dirt.

"Norican!" Gallus shouted again and as he grabbed the edge of the shuttle before Wolf caught the collar of his armor and stopped him from leaping out.

"He's dead Gallus!"

"I have to go get him!"

"If you jump out of this shuttle, they'll kill you too!"

Still, the Turian tried to jump.

Wolf pulledl him back with assistance from his biotics, yanking him back into the center of the drop bay where they tumbled to the floor together. As Gallus scrapped to try to get back up, Vela was already sliding the bay doors closed.

"Get us out of here!"

Niomi didn't hesitate to punch the thrusters.

The shuttle jerked up from the ground and bounced into the air, pulling away from the battlefield to the sound of Kett rounds pinging quietly off the hull as they floated away.


End file.
